Monday, April 12, 2010

If I Stay: A book that broke my heart, in the best possible way.

I love YA. I do. But it's been a long time since a book really got to me--made me stop and think or laugh and cry, made me feel something, long after I read the final pages. A couple of YA books have come close, but something didn't completely click. For whatever reason, I wasn't as sucked in as I wanted to be.

But then this weekend, I took the very good advice of Jodi Meadows and finally read a book that's been in my TBR pile for months: If I Stay, by Gayle Forman.

And can I just say ... Wow.

I don't know what took me so long to read it, but I'm glad I finally did. It's written in first person present tense, but it was so well done, I didn't even notice. By page 14, I was so devastated I wanted to put it down, or throw it against the wall, or something. But I couldn't. Because I couldn't stop reading long enough to do any of those things.

I can be a bit of a baby, I'll admit, but I haven't cried over a book since ... geez, maybe back in Nicholas Sparks' better days. But If I Stay didn't just make me cry over the characters; it made me think--about love, family, music, and loss. And while I was thinking, I bawled like a little girl.

It reminded me that those books, the ones that are powerful enough to stop and start your heart, they're still out there.

5 comments:

I haven't read this book but it sounds really good. I love when a book can do that to you. The last book that did for me was "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's literary fiction. They are making it into a movie I believe.

Great post--I got my hands on an ARC of IF I STAY last fall and read it pretty much in one sitting. It is such a moving book and the way Forman uses music throughout as a sort of metaphor is just breath-taking.

About Me

I'm a writer, a reader, a worker, a dreamer. I sing. I play. I dance when no one's looking. I write YA, which means I get to read books about teens and watch shows about teens and call it "research." (And here I always thought studying wasn't fun ...)